Obituary

A never-published notice of the passing of someone who never lived.
  December 10, 2002

Rosencrantz Gluckstein, Ph.D., esquire, somnambulist, expelled the dank bedroom air from his failing lungs for the last time on Tuesday, November 12.  A native of Roanoke, Virginia, Gluckstein resulted from the coitus of Amelia Button, a Roanoke socialite, and Ferdinand Gluckstein, a man in charge of flipping in the night the switch that makes trains change tracks.  Some would say his mother was a butterfly.  Some would say his father was a ruler of destinations.  Rosencrantz is survived in whole by two healthy sons and in part by a comatose daughter.

His family moved to Montana, where he attended Greendale School out in the brown hills, and despite missing two years of classes early on, graduated on time to enter Harvard at the age of eighteen.  He particularly excelled at math, music and Spanish.  It is an interesting fact that, during the previously mentioned two missed years, young Rosencrantz acquired brief local celebrity and sympathy after his televised testimony in the Missoula kidnapping trial, upon the police retrieving him from Mexico.  His mother died of grief before she could watch her son on television.

At Harvard, he immediately followed up his Ph.D. in linguistics with a law degree.  He was the Chief Editor in the Law Revue, won the mock national moot court competition, and was inducted into the Order of the Coiffure.  However, his future career as a litigator was cut short by an unfortunate incident: a bite from a rare Amazon spider escaped from a secret entomology lab and swallowed by Gluckstein during sleep necessitated tongue amputation.  The spider suffered condign death by dissolution in the digestive juices of the fiery cavern of Gluckstein’s stomach.  According to documents recently declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, the spider’s exoskeleton passed through the subject’s bowels intact, if a bit shriveled, and came out the other end to be caught for further study by eagerly awaiting military scientists.

The rest of Gluckstein’s professional life was devoted to his first passion, linguistics.  Indeed, one could say that his devotion to understanding something he could no longer fully use was phenomenal.  Fifty volumes of collected works attest to his prolific, if slightly overwritten, output.  His progress in the academe was stopped only by a worsening mental condition attributed by some to the same fateful spider bite.  He developed paranoid schizophrenia, with delusions centering on confinement in narrow spaces with strange, erratically behaved people.  He was committed to an insane asylum at the age of 67.  Although turbulent at first, his stay there ended peacefully.  In the end, he even claimed to have found god, although given the variety of the asylum’s divinely inclined patients it is not entirely clear which one.  All in all, Rosencrantz Gluckstein had lived a full and interesting life, and is sorely missed by all who knew him.

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